E-business Cases Assessment: from Business Value to System Feasibility

Innovative e-commerce initiatives present a new way of doing business. Since short time to market is a major requirement in e-commerce, and typically multiple parties (enterprises) are involved, multiple stakeholders have to be convinced quickly that the new way of doing business is technically feasible and economically profitable for them. Consequently, a lightweight approach is required for defining, deriving and analysing multi-enterprise relationships, business cases and requirements. The e3-value framework is a multi-viewpoint requirements engineering method that offers such an approach. It is based on analysing e-commerce initiatives through three stakeholder-based viewpoints. To ensure that these viewpoints keep correlated, to facilitate traceability of requirement decisions, and to support trade-off analysis between requirements we present Feature-Solution (FS) graphs as an extension to the e3-value framework. A FS-graph captures architectural knowledge in the form of desired features and solutions that realize these features. By combining the two methods, we ensure viewpoint integration, which makes it possible to conduct a systematic exploration of design alternatives in an e-commerce initiative. A business value driven information systems architecture for implementing an e-commerce system is generated as a by-product of our method.